Characterizing Caregiver-Child Interactions Through a Transactional Lens: A Baseline Analysis of a Caregiver-Implemented Intervention.
Emily K Harrington, Ann Kaiser, Megan Y Roberts and 1 others
PMID 42467651WHAT IT FOUND
In baseline play, caregivers of toddlers at risk for DLD used more vocabulary strategies when children communicated more, and more sentence strategies when children used more different words.
Each responsive strategy made child next-turn word overlap about three to four times more likely.
Key findings
01When caregiver communication rate was held fixed, children who communicated more often had caregivers who used more vocabulary strategies.
02When caregiver communication rate was held fixed, children with more different words had caregivers who used more sentence strategies.
03Child spontaneous lexical overlap was about three to four times more likely after caregiver strategy utterances than after nonstrategy utterances.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was mostly White, college-educated, and middle-class, so the patterns may not apply to families with different languages, cultures, or incomes. This was a baseline cross-sectional analysis, not an intervention comparison, so it cannot show that coaching changed caregiver behavior or child language. Child-to-caregiver and caregiver-to-child links were analyzed separately, so the study did not test true bidirectional influence in one model. Responsive toy talk was very infrequent, with wide confidence intervals, so its association with child lexical overlap is less certain. Some recordings happened at home with a remote assessor and device setup, which may have changed natural interaction.
Declared interests
Funded by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grant U01DC017135 and an Illinois Distinguished Fellowship from the University of Illinois Graduate College. The study was part of the first author's doctoral dissertation. The supplied text lists funding but does not report author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that caregiver-implemented intervention improves language. It reports baseline associations and immediate next-turn responses, not a treatment effect, and responsive toy talk was rare with wide uncertainty.